How to write luxury brand copy with Claude (and avoid the 5 tells that give it away)

Your customers can tell. Not because they know what a language model is, but because the copy feels wrong. It reads like a brochure written by someone who has never touched the product. That is the real problem with AI copy for jewellery and luxury brands, and it has nothing to do with the tool. It has everything to do with the brief.

Claude is capable of writing copy that sounds like your brand. The question is whether you are telling it enough about what your brand actually sounds like.

This article covers the five patterns that mark AI copy immediately, and exactly how to prompt your way out of them.

Why luxury copy fails fast

Luxury brand voice is built on restraint and specificity. A single adjective does more work than a paragraph. The sentence “Forged in 18ct gold, worn for a lifetime” carries weight because it is short, material, and confident. Swap it for “Crafted using world-class techniques and cutting-edge design principles” and it collapses. Not because it was written by an AI, but because it says nothing.

Claude defaults to safe, general language unless you tell it otherwise. That default is trained on the entire internet, which means it has absorbed every hollow B2B landing page and every over-written hotel brochure ever published. Your brief is what pulls it away from that gravity.

The five tells

1. Em-dash overuse

The em-dash has become the single most recognisable marker of AI-generated prose. It appears compulsively between clauses, where a comma or a full stop would serve better. Luxury copy rarely uses it at all. When briefing Claude, include a direct instruction: no em-dashes. Use a comma, a colon, or a new sentence.

2. Filler openers

“In today’s competitive landscape…” and “As a jewellery maker, you know that…” are the two most common first sentences in AI copy. Neither says anything. Luxury brands open with the object, the material, or the moment. Tell Claude: start with a concrete noun or a short declarative statement. Never open with “In today’s” or “As a”.

3. Passive constructions

“Each piece is crafted by skilled artisans” is passive and distant. “Our goldsmiths work in wax before they work in metal” is active and specific. Passive voice hides the maker. For jewellery copy especially, the maker is the story. Instruct Claude to use active voice and to name the process where possible.

4. Over-hedging

“May potentially”, “could possibly”, “aims to help” are hedges borrowed from legal writing. They signal uncertainty. Luxury brands are certain. A piece either takes two weeks or it does not. The stone is either responsibly sourced or it is not. Strip hedging entirely. Ask Claude to state things directly, without qualifiers.

5. Generic superlatives

“World-class”, “cutting-edge”, “unparalleled quality” are superlatives that have lost all meaning through overuse. One of our academy members replaced “unparalleled craftsmanship” with “set in a hand-cut bezel, no two exactly alike” and her enquiry rate doubled the following month. Specificity is the luxury signal. Ask Claude for sensory and material detail, not rankings.

How to brief Claude properly

A good brief for luxury copy contains four things: the voice (adjectives that describe your brand’s tone), the constraints (what you never say), a reference sentence (one line of existing copy you like), and the specific job (product name, material, occasion, word count).

Here is a template you can use directly:

Copy-paste prompt
Write a 60-word product description for [item]. Voice: understated, material, confident. No em-dashes. No filler openers. No superlatives. Active voice. Reference sentence for tone: "[paste a line of your own copy here]". Focus on the specific material and the way it is worn.

That last instruction, “the way it is worn”, is the one most people miss. Jewellery copy that describes only the object misses half the story. The context, the occasion, the feeling of putting it on, is where emotion lives. Claude will write that half readily, once you ask for it.

One more thing: iterate with your own words

After Claude produces a first draft, read it aloud. Anything that would not come naturally out of your mouth is a candidate for rewriting. Paste those rewritten lines back into the next prompt as a new reference sentence. Over three or four rounds, the output starts to sound like you, not like a chatbot that has read too many hotel brochures.

This is the practice we teach at Maker’s AI Lab: not how to use Claude, but how to build the briefs, the constraints, and the feedback loops that make Claude sound like your brand. If that interests you, the next step is at hamedarab.academy.